NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

Six years after Kate Bemis walked into the NOAA National Systematics Lab for the first day of her Hollings summer internship, she returned to the office — only now she was starting the first day of her new career and adding a new label to the door that read "Katherine Bemis, Ph.D.”

Phenomenon-based learning is an educational approach that engages students in science. It starts with a “phenomenon,” or an attention-grabbing image or video clip that hooks students into the lesson. In these modules, we use datasets from NOAA’s Science On a Sphere® (SOS) to help explore and explain science phenomena. The modules are also aligned to NGSS.

The tornado outbreaks of 2011 were unprecedented. Destruction to life and property occurred in more than a dozen states from the Central Plains and Missouri, throughout the Southeast and as far north as Massachusetts. In total, 1,691 tornadoes claimed 553 lives, making it the deadliest tornado year since 1936.

Scientists take measurements to unlock clues to the life cycle of a tornado.

Cold-stunned sea turtles get help from an unlikely place: the general aviation community.

Over the past few decades in American Samoa and the nation of Samoa, problems with solid waste management have been exacerbated by limited space and a steadily increasing amount of imported goods and materials. The increase of lightweight, but not durable, plastic items are visible across much of the region’s coastlines, where plastic debris, such as food and beverage containers, household goods, and synthetic clothing, litter the shores.

One of the main types of marine debris that you hear about today is plastic marine debris. In many places, it is the main type of debris that you will see as you walk along a beach, though perhaps not underwater. As common as they are on our beaches and in our homes, how much do you really know about plastics?

Although plastics are vital in a slew of consumer applications, plastic pollution in the ocean has turned out to be a not-so-fantastic outcome of modern day plastic dependence. This presentation provides an overview of the ocean plastic pollution problem, explaining the difference between marine debris and microplastics. It also will outline the current state of knowledge about microplastic impacts in the ocean and marine food webs, and provide insight into an ongoing research project using seabirds as indicators of plastic pollution in the Northwest Atlantic.

Use discovery and inquiry techniques to investigate a lava lamp and relate it to Earth’s internal processes that cause geological phenomena such as earthquakes, mountain building, and seafloor trenches.

A NOAA-funded study has documented that ocean acidification along the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast is impacting the shells and sensory organs of some young Dungeness crab, a prized crustacean that supports the most valuable fishery on the West Coast.